Email Trove Is Big Job for Bush Library

Busts of the Bushes' Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley, are on display at the new presidential center, which opens on May 1 in Dallas.
Associated Press

By

Ana Campoy

April 24, 2013 7:25 p.m. ET

DALLAS—Along with the obligatory replica of the Oval Office, the George W. Bush Presidential Center will house a less conventional collection of presidential artifacts when it is dedicated here Thursday: Millions of emails.

The one billion pages or so in electronic White House correspondence during George W. Bush's eight years in office are unprecedented in the history of presidential libraries, scholars said. They promise to offer an unvarnished look at the inner workings of the Bush administration that hasn't been possible for other presidencies.

But first, the roughly 200 million emails have to be reviewed by the center's archivists, a process that could take a long time. With current technology, archivists can only review about 800,000 pages a year.

"It's a fantastic resource," said Alan Lowe, director of the Bush library, located on the campus of Southern Methodist University. "Our challenge is, how do you preserve it? And how do you process it to make it available?"

The Bush library is at the forefront of a growing problem for the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that keeps the nation's trove of historic documents. The digital stacks of information it has to process are rapidly expanding as more of the government's business is conducted via email.

Presidential electronic records went from none during the Carter presidency, to less than one terabyte—one trillion bytes—during each of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, according to Sam McClure, deputy director of the National Archives' Office of Presidential Libraries. Electronic records then grew to 4 terabytes during the Clinton years, he said.

The size of the electronic library at the Bush Center: 80 terabytes. "It really is the new frontier of archival practice," said Mr. McClure, of the task for the center's staff. "They're setting the stage for every other administration."

During an event at the center Wednesday before the library's public opening, former first lady Laura Bush said her husband didn't want to build a monument to himself. The goal, she said, was to lay out the principles that they believed were important and to give visitors a chance to contemplate the decisions a president faces.

In planning the library, Mr. Bush's instructions were: "Put out the facts. Show what happened, and let people decide," said Karen Hughes, who was a top adviser to Mr. Bush.

Visitors have a chance to do just that in the Decision Points Theater. There, guests stand in front of screens and make their own decisions when presented with scenarios related to the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis, as interactive displays allow them to heed or reject advisers' guidance.

ENLARGE

From left, first lady Michelle Obama, President Barack Obama, former first lady Barbara Bush, and former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush bow their heads during the ceremony's invocation.
Associated Press

ENLARGE

Former presidents attend the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on Thursday in Dallas.
Getty Images

Traditional mementos, such as a red-sequined ball gown from a state dinner and scribbled-on speech cards, also are on display.

The emails, however, will only be accessible to the archivists working on them, at least initially. Starting next year, the public can request specific items under the Freedom of Information Act.

While the National Archives has developed a massive storage system for electronic files, the agency is still looking for technology to sift through the documents more quickly, officials said. Each page has to be inspected—and redacted or withheld, if necessary for security reasons.

In addition to the bulging electronic archive, workers also have to handle the more traditional papers that presidential libraries have dealt in since 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt created the first by donating his documents to the government.

The Bush Center alone has some 70 million pages in such memos, letters and reports.

So far, the National Archive has gone through 45%, or some 315 million pages, of all the papers housed in presidential libraries, with about 385 million remaining.

"Obviously, to be able to learn from our history, to avoid the mistakes of the past, they need to process those things more quickly," said Benjamin Hufbauer, an associate professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who wrote a book about presidential libraries.

A 2012 study by a congressional panel, the Public Interest Declassification Board, urged President Barack Obama to modernize the way the government analyzes documents and releases them to the public. In a previous report in 2007, it recommended that the National Archives hire more specialists to process presidential files.

The Bush Center will have more archivists than some of its peers—16 compared to 10 at the Eisenhower library, for example.

Dan Mahaffee, who coordinates research at the Center on the Study of the Presidency and Congress, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said the emails will allow researchers to get into the minds of top officials as they developed policy, instead of relying on memos written at the end of the decision-making process.

Still, he added, there are limits to the kind of information they may offer.

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